Dust Settles, and Festival Has New Life : Art: Many Sawdust Festival exhibitors decide to sit this one out after steep increase in the booth fee. The upshot is a variety of new artists.

For two years John Winston, a gemstone sculptor, tried in vain to rent a booth at the Sawdust Festival, a popular summertime spot for showcasing the talents of local artists and craftsmen in this art colony.

He was thwarted by a lottery system with a seniority provision that favored artists who had shown their work at the Sawdust in the past.

But this year Winston finally won a booth in the drawing. When the festival opens next month, he plans to put out his “best work” and to finish carving “the world’s largest turquoise eagle” at the festival as a way to attract customers while educating them about his technique. The eagle will be priced at $175,000.

“I’d like to add to the image of the Sawdust. I’m really excited,” he said.

Winston is one of 28 exhibitors who will be appearing for the first time this year at the festival, almost three times the number of new entrants as in previous years.

This infusion of new artistic blood into the eight-week festival when it opens July 6 was entirely unplanned. Because $100,000 in improvements had to be made to the food concession areas this year to meet county health department codes, the festival sharply raised its rental rates from $300 to $900 per entrant.

When old-timers complained, they were told they could sit out the festival for a year without losing the seniority status that would permit them to return in future years. Many thus chose to go on what they are calling “a sabbatical,” taking a year out to recover from artistic burnout.

As a result, far fewer artists and craftsmen will be showing and selling their work at the festival this year; in all there will be 190 exhibitors, down from 258 last summer.

But organizers of the 25-year-old festival are predicting a positive outcome. They say the new exhibitors will bring a welcome change of pace to the show that critics accuse of having grown artistically stale.

Moreover, they say the festival will benefit from changes in the rules that for the first time will require half the art on display to be original rather than commercial reproductions and for all the exhibitors to give public demonstrations of how they create their work.

“The idea is to upgrade the whole show,” said Chris Krach, a potter and president this year of the Sawdust Festival board of directors. “It will be kind of like a renaissance of the Sawdust.” Krach said that while booth fees are up this year, admission prices will remain the same: $4 general, $3 for seniors and free for children under 12.

Not everyone likes the changes. Scott Moore, a water colorist, said he has no interest in exhibiting his work at the Sawdust this year because he objects to the requirement that he demonstrate his painting at least six hours a week on the grounds.

As the festival’s name implies, the dirt grounds are covered with wood dust to give it an atmosphere befitting the hippie-era origin of the event.

“I couldn’t be painting anything saleable down there because of the sawdust in the air,” Moore said. Also, he said he didn’t want to spend his time doing free demonstrations for which he gets “close to $100 an hour” at museum workshops.

But John Eagle, who does oil paintings of Laguna Canyon, agrees with the festival’s operators that “working artists are what the public loves to see” and says he is looking forward to painting at the festival. “Those who participate with enthusiasm and vigor will be able to market more of their work. It is a great marketing tool,” he argued.

Artists say the quality of work displayed at the Sawdust has suffered from a parallel exhibition held at the Festival of the Arts just down the road. Unlike the Sawdust, the Festival of the Arts is a juried show, meaning that only art that meets the standards of judges can be exhibited.

The upshot is that some artists take their freshest and finest work to the Festival and ship their reproductions and other less costly work to the Sawdust.

Mike Hallinan, an acrylic painter who for years has sold his prints at the Sawdust and originals at the Festival of the Arts, bolted at the Sawdust’s new original art requirement and didn’t enter the lottery for this year’s Sawdust exhibitors. But he said he changed his mind after the lottery when there were unclaimed booths.

“I got an entire booth for myself,” Hallinan said with elation. Usually, he said, there are so many exhibitors that he has to share space with a jeweler or potter.

Linda Potichke, a jeweler and goldsmith who has been showing her work for seven years at the Sawdust, said, “the overall feeling of the show is low-end and volume. I walked through the show one evening last year in a detached manner and I was embarrassed.” She added that while some of the work was “very good,” it got lost in the crowd of less worthy wares.

Potichke, who has decided to show only at the Festival of the Arts this year, said she worries that the Sawdust has become primarily a place for the public to buy souvenirs and be entertained.

But several of the artists who will man booths for the first time at the Sawdust say the show has a special charm of its own, partly because of the imaginative booths built by the artists, which this year will range in shape from a Victorian house to a castle. Music from jazz to country-western as well as mimes and jugglers add to the festive atmosphere.

“The show is more fun, more lively than the Festival of the Arts,” said Martin Roberts, who this year for the first time will exhibit his hand-colored fine art photography at the Sawdust.

Roberts noted that with 250,000 in attendance last year, the Sawdust outdraws the Festival of the Arts and Art-A-Fair, another exhibition that is held in town during the same eight weeks. “There are people who make an entire year’s living from showing two months (at the Sawdust),” he said, contending that the higher entry fee is “in keeping with what the traffic will bear.”

Terry Thornsley, a sculptor and painter who is among the new entrants at the Sawdust, said this year’s $900 fee, which festival officials expect to lower to about $500 next year, is a bargain compared with fees charged at other shows around the country.

Thornsley, whose current work ranges in price from $100 for an unframed wildlife watercolor study to $20,000 for a stone sculpture, said that while he has shown his work at the Festival of the Arts for 10 years, this year he will also be at the Sawdust. “I want to see what the market has to offer,” he said.

Thornsley said he has noticed that many people who come to Laguna Beach to see the Pageant of the Masters, a popular tableaux show produced with local actors, visit the Festival of Arts “by accident” because they share the same grounds. “I think that more of the people who go to the Sawdust actually want to spend time looking,” he said.